On Veterans Day, we honor our surviving warriors. We rightly give thanks to those who have sacrificed their personal peace for the survival of the nation. And we rededicate ourselves to fulfilling the pledge “to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan.” War endures. The oldest [...]
Demands for statesmanship tend to hold up a model of greatness in political leadership that is profoundly dangerous. The desire to be “great” by upholding the interests of the nation as a political whole promotes a massive increase in the extent and centralization of political power. I recently attended a conference on statesmanship. Truth be [...]
In a democratic age, how can greatness come to be? Edmund Burke offers a way forward: prudence as a form of excellence. Our conference is subtitled “equality and the survival of heroism.” My concern is the survival of prudence amid the longing for heroism—in particular, the misalignment between ambition and circumstance, the persistent pursuit of [...]
The Battle of Fort Sumter lasted 34 hours, killed no one, and wasted 4,000 Confederate rounds and 1,000 Federal rounds. At that point, it was one of the largest artillery battles ever fought on North American soil. The Confederates loved the glory and honor, as they understood it, when Abner Doubleday fired back, paid to [...]
In early March of 1861, without Abraham Lincoln’s authorization, Secretary of State William Seward told Southern commissioners as well as the Northern press that Lincoln would not fight for Fort Sumter. When the Commissioners demanded to meet with a Lincoln official on March 14, 1861, Seward properly declined, but agreed, in a rather complicated fashion, [...]
The hardest decision of Abraham Lincoln's presidency revolved around the Confederate garrison stationed at Fort Sumter. On March 5, 1861, Abraham Lincoln, only president for a day, had to make a decision on what to do. Lincoln had a divided cabinet, a divided party, and a divided country. Half of his cabinet wanted war with [...]
The vision presented by the 1776 Commission—established by President Trump and recently quashed by President Biden—suggested that it would prove ultimately irrelevant in combatting the efforts of the 1619 Project. In fact, the 1776 Commission offered an interpretation of American history that is not only wrong-headed, but completely self-destructive. To anyone devoted to the political [...]
Throughout his political career, Abraham Lincoln connected the maintenance of freedom with the preservation of the free West. If the American West fell, so would American liberty. Richard W. Etulain’s “Abraham Lincoln: A Western Legacy” seeks to show more explicitly Lincoln’s relationship with the West. Abraham Lincoln: A Western Legacy by Richard W. Etulain (198 [...]
As an instructor at the Virginia Military Institute, Thomas Jonathan Jackson was a poor professor, given to memorizing his lectures and delivering them in a monotone voice to his classes, word-for-word. His students teased him behind his back and fired spitballs at each other during classes, with little fear of their wooden, seemingly hapless teacher. [...]
The new president would do well to take a lesson from history’s greatest orator and remind his increasingly diverse constituents that we all share the same uniquely American principles. Freshly sworn in after a contentious election, the new president stands to give his first inaugural address. Violence had begun to erupt immediately after the announcement [...]
After the War Between the States, there was a conscious effort at reconciliation on the part of many in both North and South. This postbellum reconciliation has mostly unraveled, in no small part thanks to conservative establishmentarians who for years have refused to raise a peep—or, in many cases, collaborated—during the leftist campaign against Southern [...]
If for M.E. Bradford, Abraham Lincoln was a gnostic renegade and heretic beyond the pale, he was for Richard Weaver a political and rhetorical father figure with whom one might argue but never condemn. These Southerners’ differing critiques of Lincoln’s person, views, and actions cast some light on this complex figure, one who continues to [...]
The symbolic honor given to Confederate leaders through statuary does not need to be interpreted as racism or an endorsement of slavery. It can also be understood as a process of reconciliation and a refusal to deny the primordial unity of the country. It is peace-making instead of imposing a public memory of defeat and [...]
Europeans introduced the “Five Civilized Tribes” of the southeast to the institution of racial slavery. And during the Civil War, the Five Civilized Tribes fought on both the Union and Confederate sides. This often-overlooked part of American history takes on new significance in light of today’s debates over slavery reparations and monuments to those who [...]